New controller can tailor games to your level of excitement

What if, instead of choosing a difficulty level, you chose an experience type? When starting a new game you might select not between Easy, Medium, and Hard, but between Relaxed, Tense, and Harrowing. On relaxed, the game might back off in response to rising makers for frustration, letting you move forward rather than rage against an obstacle. On Harrowing, your every fear could become a reality, the slightest hint of boredom met with an onslaught of your greatest gaming peeves.

Such a system would require the ability to collect such emotional information from people, but that’s hardly a challenge for modern technology; we might not be able to read people’s thoughts and emotions well enough for admissibility in court, but video games are another matter entirely. A team of engineers from Stanford University are putting that idea to the test, however, with an Xbox 360 controller specially modified to collect emotional data from players.

The controller works with metal strips inlaid into either handle, which measure heart rate, breathing rate, skin temperature, and more. Accelerometers can detect how much the controller is being shaken — probably the single most powerful measure of frustration for gamers. The intent is to collect information about how the player is responding to a game, allowing players to tailor their experience and concerned parents to stop games that are getting children too worked up.

EEG set-ups like this one can certainly measure emotion, but aren’t exactly user-friendly.

Probably the biggest critic of the disequilibrium between information input and output in gaming is Will Wright. Output, he has often complained, is easy; 1080p gaming with surround sound audio can deliver a ton of bits-per-second to the player, and with rumble and other forms of feedback the stream gets even more dense. Yet input — the ability of the player to deliver information to the machine — is much more primitive. We can literally scream our intent at the console (“GO FORWARD!”) and our advanced, next-gen gaming consoles will sit without heed.

The Wii, Playstation Move, and Kinect are three different historical attempts to solve this problem, translating physical movement into control information. Kinect especially seems to cry out for applications like this controller, with its built-in ability to monitor heart rate and other biometrics. By making the hard decision to include a Kinect with every Xbox One, Microsoft may have positioned the Xbox as the only console capable of biometric monitoring without any additional hardware. Depending on how things play out this generation, that could end up being a very powerful factor in the next chapter of the console wars.